one big array, or a boot array and a (less big) array ?
Scott Long
scottl at samsco.org
Wed Nov 29 14:38:11 PST 2006
Arone Silimantia wrote:
> I have a system with 8 drive bays. I have 8 250 GB
> disks.
>
> I would like to just create one giant raid5 array in
> my adaptec hardware raid controller of size 1.75 TB,
> and just make my partitions (/, /data, /var) on that
> big 2 TB array.
>
> But I feel like I have heard suggestions on this list
> before that one should have a separate array just for
> the boot and userland, and that the big monster array
> should be separate from that.
>
> So instead, should I take two of the 8 disks and make
> them a mirror, and put boot/userland on there, and
> then make a raid5 out of the remaining 6 ?
>
> Or does it not matter at all ?
>
> If one is better, why ? Thanks.
>
If reliability is your highest priority, then you should create (as you
describe above) a 2 disk RAID-1, a 5 disk RAID-5, and assign the 8th
disk as a global hot-spare. Putting 8 SATA disks into a single
enclosure has implications for cooling all of those drives, which in
turn has implications for drive life. If I were doing it, this is
exactly what I'd do.
Scott
More information about the freebsd-fs
mailing list